The online dating application has in recent years become a major avenue for meeting potential partners. However, while the digital public sphere has gained the attention of political philosophers, a systematic normative evaluation of issues arising in the “digital sexual sphere” is lacking. I provide a philosophical framework for assessing the conduct of dating app corporations, capturing both the motivations of users, and the reason why they find usage unsatisfying. Identifying dating apps as agents intervening in a social institution necessary for the reproduction of society, with immense power over people’s lives, I ask if they exercise their power in line with individuals’ interests. Acknowledging that people have claims to noninterference, equal standing, and choice improvement relating to intimacy, I find that the traditional, nondigital, sexual sphere poses problems to their realisation, especially for sexual minorities. In this context, apps’ potential for justice in the sexual sphere is immense but unfulfilled.

Oversight, scholars argue, allows Congress to control the executive agents it empowers to implement law. Yet the tools of oversight are rather limited and debate continues as to how much influence oversight provides. How well can members of Congress motivate bureaucratic performance? To measure the efficacy of oversight, we create a new dataset matching oversight efforts to a bureaucratic deficiency Congress has sought to reduce since the early 2000s: improperly made payments to contractors and clients. We estimate the effect of congressional hearings, one of the most important tools of congressional oversight, as well as correspondence, appropriation committee reports, statutes, and executive action. We find that hearings lead to subsequent declines in improper payments. The magnitude of the effect, however, is small relative to the scope of the problem, suggesting strong limits on the efficacy of oversight. Our findings imply that America’s elected officials struggle to effectively manage implementation of policy.

Studies of colonialism often associate indirect colonial rule with continuity of the precolonial institutions. Yet, we know less about how colonialism affected the distribution of power between precolonial domestic elites within nominally continuous institutions. We argue that colonial authorities will redistribute power toward elites that are the most congruent with the colonizer’s objectives. We test our theory on the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. Using an original dataset on members of the Egyptian parliament and a difference-in-differences empirical strategy, we show that the colonial authorities shifted parliamentary representation toward the (congruent) landed elite and away from the (oppositional) rural middle class. This shift was greater in cotton-producing provinces which were more exposed to colonial economic interest. Our results demonstrate that the colonial redistribution of power within precolonial institutions can reengineer the social-structural fabric of colonized societies.

Information on social media is characterized by networked curation processes in which users select other users from whom to receive information, and those users in turn share information that promotes their identities and interests. We argue this allows for partisan “curation bubbles” of users who share and consume content with consistent appeal drawn from a variety of sources. Yet, research concerning the extent of filter bubbles, echo chambers, or other forms of politically segregated information consumption typically conceptualizes information’s partisan valence at the source level as opposed to the story level. This can lead domain-level measures of audience partisanship to mischaracterize the partisan appeal of sources’ constituent stories—especially for sources estimated to be more moderate. Accounting for networked curation aligns theory and measurement of political information consumption on social media.

Examining group boundaries is instrumental to understanding intergroup relations, particularly differences in boundary drawing between prototypical and peripheral group members. Whether identity strength and prototypicality have an interactive effect on how group members draw boundaries has been underexplored. We also know less about how different Latinos are viewed, despite the group’s vast diversity. This paper takes up these questions and compares white and Black Americans’ views of Latinos as American. Strikingly, among all respondents, U.S. born Latinos are seen as less American when their parent is undocumented. The results suggest that Black Americans are driven by economic and political concerns and perceive greater commonality with more marginalized Latinos. Whites are driven by cultural concerns and prefer those who will not challenge their prototypicality. This illustrates a divergence in how Latinos are received among each group.

Many Americans express a mix of conservative and liberal views across issues. Prior research indicates these voters are cross-pressured. A recent, influential article “Moderates” (Fowler et al. 2023) argues that these voters instead largely have centrist views on individual issues. To reach this conclusion, “Moderates” develops a method to determine which voters’ views are well-summarized by liberal-conservative ideology. “Moderates” finds that most voters’ views are. It therefore concludes that the large number of such voters with centrist estimated ideologies—“moderates”—must hold centrist views on issues. We show that this method systematically overstates how many voters’ views are well-summarized by liberal-conservative ideology: it assumes voters’ views are unless they either answer questions randomly or form a single cluster with distinctive views. In simulations, we show this problem is large. The article’s core conclusion that many voters who express a mix of conservative and liberal views can be inferred to support centrist policies therefore remains in doubt.

We examine how the effects of initiatives intended to promote programmatic competition are conditioned by candidates’ often mixed incentives to participate in them. In a nationwide debate initiative designed to solicit and widely rebroadcast policy promises from Liberian legislative candidates, we analyze the randomized encouragement of debate participation across districts. The intervention substantially increased the debate participation of leading candidates but had uneven electoral consequences, with incumbents benefiting at the expense of their challengers. These results are driven by incumbents’ more positive selection into participation on the basis of their policy alignment with voters; voters’ heightened attention to them; and how candidates’ campaigns responded in turn. The results underscore wide variation in candidates’ suitability for programmatic politics and highlight important challenges in transitioning away from clientelistic political equilibria.

We present a Fickle Prosocial Violence Response Model to explain how indirect exposure to civilian-perpetrated violence against marginalized minority groups motivates prosocial attitudes toward victimized groups. Although the mass public may not sympathize with marginalized groups, they may adopt prosocial attitudes toward marginalized groups subject to civilian-perpetrated violence if the violence is salient and perceptibly illegitimate. However, the adoption of prosocial attitudes may be fickle. We find evidence consistent with the model. Studies 1–3 show that high-profile violence against LGBTQ+ people increases support for LGBTQ+ rights and reduces negative attitudes toward LGBTQ+ group members. But, the adoption of prosocial attitudes is short-term. Study 4 shows that less salient violence against LGBTQ+ people may not engender prosocial attitudes at the outset. Our findings suggest that violent events must be sufficiently salient to initially motivate prosocial beliefs. Nevertheless, salient civilian-perpetrated violence against marginalized groups may not sustainably motivate prosocial beliefs toward targeted groups.

Theories of international relations (IR) typically make predictions intended to hold across many countries, yet existing experimental evidence testing their micro-foundations relies overwhelmingly on studies fielded in the United States. We argue that the broad nature of many IR theories makes it especially important to evaluate the extent to which their predictions hold across countries. To examine the generalizability of IR experimental findings beyond the US, we implemented a preregistered and harmonized multisite replication study, fielding four prominent IR experiments across a diverse set of seven democracies: Brazil, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Nigeria, and the US. We find high levels of generalizability across all four experiments, a pattern further analysis suggests is due to limited treatment effect heterogeneity. Our findings and approach offer important empirical and methodological insights for the design and interpretation of future experimental research in IR.

This article presents a new theory of majoritarian domination drawn from Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar’s critique of majoritarian tyranny during the decades preceding British India’s decolonization. Ambedkar’s critique of British colonial pluralism and Congress-led Indian anticolonialism emphasizes attention to social structures and the mechanisms that produce and sustain communal majorities. He argues that caste prevents equality and fraternity, thus foreclosing the possibility of a democratic society. In such a context, Ambedkar argues that the majority is likely to be communal and fixed, rather than political, inclusive, and open to change over time. Ambedkarian majoritarian domination supplements nineteenth-century accounts of the institutional and epistemic dimensions of majoritarian tyranny. I defend comparison as a tool for theoretical analysis to show that Ambedkarian majoritarian domination can explain the interaction of hierarchical social structures with democratic politics in contexts beyond colonial India.

The Vietnam Draft Lotteries, which randomly assigned men to military service, enable researchers to assess the long-term effects of interracial contact on racial attitudes. Using a new draft status indicator for respondents to the General Social Surveys 1978–2021, we show that white men who were selected for the draft subsequently expressed less negative attitudes toward Black people and toward policies designed to help them. These effects are apparent only for cohorts that were actually drafted into service, suggesting that interracial contact during military service led to attitude change. These findings have important implications for theories of political socialization and prejudice reduction.

Do abortion restrictions augur broader crackdowns on human rights? We examine the relationship between restrictions on abortion and future Physical Integrity Rights (PIR) abuses. We argue that abortion restrictions both directly and indirectly influence PIR. Directly, abortion restrictions serve as a testing ground for repressive policies and behaviors. Indirectly, restrictions worsen inequality across segments of society and winnow support for social and religious diversity. When abortion restrictions are enacted, regimes are better equipped to shift society and consolidate power, as a subdued public is discouraged from voicing collective grievances. Using a variety of time-series cross-sectional approaches, we show that significant retractions in abortion access foretell erosion of PIR.

Recent scholarship finds that exposure to mass shootings has no effect on Democratic vote shares. While arguably a reasonable proxy for public demand for heightened gun control, this outcome nonetheless reflects myriad issue concerns, with guns being just one issue typically dwarfed in importance by the attention given in electoral campaigns to jobs, the economy, and other social issues. Our research improves the issue-domain correspondence between treatment and outcome by analyzing voting directly on gun policy. We leverage a mass shooting that occurred in Washington state shortly before residents voted on a ballot measure to regulate firearms. Critically, a previous measure on firearms appeared on the ballot in Washington 2 years prior, enabling our analysis to control for pretreatment support for gun control. Across various model specifications, we find that proximity to the shooting was associated with increased support for gun control. We replicate this finding with three additional shootings.

From the bottom to the top of society, many white men are angry. This article provides a reputation-based rationale for this anger. Individuals care about their social status (elite vs. non-elite) and their social reputation (how they expect others to perceive them). Everyone is uncertain about how one becomes a member of the elite. When new information reveals that the system is biased in favor of white men, the social reputation of all white men decreases, causing a payoff loss. In contrast, policies meant to reduce inequalities in the access to the elite can be supported by some white men and opposed by others. The article highlights how the backlash from white men in recent years needs not be driven by racial animus or sexism and may instead be caused by a loss of status and/or reputation.

Mainstream parties have often shifted from initially portraying new competitors as undemocratic pariahs (i.e., a delegitimizing strategy) to portraying the same parties later as democratic (i.e., a legitimizing strategy). I argue that voters follow mainstream parties’ legitimizing strategies in their legitimacy evaluations of these parties. I investigate this argument with two independent survey experiments and a quantitative media content analysis in two countries that differ sharply in the nature of party competition—from mainstream parties delegitimizing a far-right party (i.e., Germany) to mainstream parties legitimizing it (i.e., Sweden). I find strong evidence that (a) mainstream parties can effectively legitimize pariah parties in the eyes of voters, (b) turning back to delegitimization has little effect, (c) legitimization is no less effective in the face of a third party’s delegitimizing strategy, and (d) legitimization resonates beyond co-partisans. The results suggest that mainstream party legitimization of pariah parties has far-reaching consequences.

Since Key and Allport, scholars have argued that racial context affects political behavior, with some finding out-group contact increases intergroup hostility and others showing the opposite. We argue that Americans exist in multiple racial contexts simultaneously that may overlap or conflict, helping to explain past discord. Using novel data, we document in-group embeddedness among the four largest U.S. ethnoracial groups for three kinds of racial context: geographic, social, and psychological. These three contexts are only weakly correlated, we find, with social ties exhibiting distinctly high rates of in-group segregation. We next examine the relationship between racial contexts and political attitudes, showing that individuals who are highly embedded across contexts express notably different views than those who experience cross-cutting pressures. Our results underscore a need for greater care and specificity when examining the relationship between “racial context” and political phenomena.

More than 1,100 studies have been published that examine the effects of democracy using cross-national data since 2000. This article examines whether these analyses have sufficient statistical power to detect an effect of democracy. Using Monte Carlo simulation and examining consensus effects previously reported in the literature, the article finds that studies are only powered to detect very strong effects of democracy when examining countries over time. This raises questions about what sort of relationships can be analyzed using cross-national data.

Migrant labor exploitation is widespread in developed countries, which host growing populations of undocumented migrants. While denouncing by migrants is essential to prosecute exploitative employers, an undocumented community actively hiding from the state is unlikely to whistleblow. I consider an intervention providing migrant farmworkers in Italy information and incentives to report on their racketeers. I leverage the staggered rollout of the intervention to study its effects in a difference-in-differences framework. The intervention empowered migrants to whistleblow, increased the prosecution of criminal organizations responsible for racketeering migrants, and raised awareness among natives, who became more favorable toward immigration and parties supporting it. These findings highlight the conditions under which undocumented migrants can take political action for their socioeconomic advancement. Unlike other integration policies which have been shown to backlash, highlighting migrants’ vulnerability to exploitation might foster solidarity and more liberal immigration attitudes among natives.